Correspondent: You’ve alluded now many times to the passage at the end of that chapter, which I would describe as the American Pastoral moment. I’m very curious as to how that came to be, the particular doors, through the wrong end of the telescope…

Russo: I’m sorry. Which?

Correspondent: The three paragraphs where you have him describing all the doors that are open at youth and then not open.

Russo: Oh right.

Correspondent: Yeah, we’re talking through the wrong end of the telescope. And so on.

Russo: Yeah.

Correspondent: So I’m curious as to where that moment, which seems to me the more American Pastoral moment, came from exactly. How that came to be laid down.

Russo: You know, it’s funny. That particular metaphor of doors, of walking through doors closed behind you, and then having fewer doors to walk through and choose between, was the metaphor that I used to use when I was teaching to describe how plot worked.

Correspondent: Interesting.

Russo: When I was teaching my undergraduate and especially my graduate students. Plot is a very difficult — they say, how do you come up with a story? How do you know what happens first? What happens next? All of that. And I was trying to explain to them that the best stories, the best plots, are the ones that end up kind of paradoxically, you want to be surprised. But after the surprise, you want a sense of inevitability. Like that’s the only place the story could have gone. Those two things, that’s why a lot of books are disappointing. Because that’s a very hard effect to achieve. How can you surprise somebody even as, after they register the surprise, they say, “Oh, of course. This is the only way it can go. This is the only way it could have gone.” Those two things are antithetical. And yet the best books always have that. That coming together. So I was always looking for a metaphor to explain that to people. To my students. And I’d say, all right. Think of it this way. You’ve got a thousand doors. You choose one. You walk through it. Now you’ve got five hundred doors. You walk through that. You’ve got two hundred and fifty doors. Every time I started explaining that to students, that there were fewer and fewer doors, that was going to provide the inevitability. But there was still the surprise. You didn’t know. Every time a character makes a decision, it seems that there are so many other possibilities. So it’s a series of surprises that ends up with a sense of inevitability. But as I explained that to my students, and as I was writing this book, it occurred to me that’s also a description of life and destiny.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Russo: (laughs) So I had lectured my students and then that lecture had provided a metaphor for this — the most complex of my novels.

Correspondent: Wow. So I guess the more representative a book is of life, the more that you can grapple onto teaching metaphors. (laughs)

Russo: (laughs)

[Richard Russo has also offered an essay at Powell’s, in which he describes his own “lazy” writing impulse.]

Wow, folks, I’m truly stunned. Thanks very much to all the donors whose donations came overnight. It looks like I’ll be sending out quite a number of chapbooks next month.

We are now about 70% of the way there towards making the $800 pledge sum happen. And I’m convinced, based on this remarkable turnaround in within less than twenty-four hours, that we can meet this $800 goal. (And once we do, I assure you that the PBS-style braying will cease.)

As I stated previously, the plan was to keep going with this if we had reached $600 by the end of this week. Well, it looks quite probable that we’ll get here before the end of today. But we’re not out of the woods just yet.

Again, if you’ve enjoyed the podcasts and want to see them continue quite prolifically throughout the end of the year, please feel free to donate. Those who donate $10 or more will receive a chapbook containing a Bat Segundo history, an excerpt from the play Wrestling an Alligator, and an excerpt from the novel-in-progress Humanity Unlimited. And remember, a donation is the only way to learn about Mr. Segundo’s mysterious history, which has only been alluded over the course of these podcasts.

Thanks again to everyone.

Here’s where we’re at. $243 has been raised so far — a little more than 30% of the goal.

Many thanks to everyone who was kind enough to contribute today. I will keep the donors’ names anonymous out of respect for their privacy. But for everyone who has donated $10 or more, they will receive a copy of the special Segundo Chapbook sometime in late November. Again, all we’re shooting for here is $800. So if you’ve appreciated The Bat Segundo Show and want to see it flourish through the remainder of the year, please take some time to contribute.

The deal is this: if we can generate $600 before the end of this week, I’ll keep the pledge drive going through next week until we hit past $800. If we can make this happen, this should permit me to carry forth with the interviews. (And for those who have emailed your concerns about what I will do in lieu of this cash, don’t worry. I have several backup plans now in the works.)

Thanks again.

In almost four years of running Reluctant and two years of running The Bat Segundo Show, I have never openly asked for money on this website. Sure, there’s been a donation bar on the side, and some of you have graciously pitched in. I thank those of you who have. There’s also been some advertising, which has likewise helped. But this website has largely been run on my own dime. I’ve done my best to stimulate conversation and to make this a place for the literary community to connect.

So it pains me to make the following announcement. I’ve always tried to be self-sufficient here, ensuring that I can provide you, the readers and the listeners, with free content about the literary news and developments of our time.

But here’s the cold hard truth: Due to an unforeseen development on the advertising front, I’m out $800 this month. I’ve made some calls and spoken to a few people, and it appears that this is $800 I may not see for a while. The specific individuals responsible for collecting these monies have as much interest in performing their duties or informing me of their progress as the CIA. While I’ll be all right next month for income that has nothing to do with advertising, in the meantime, I’m now facing a shortfall that I’ll have to make up in the forthcoming weeks.

Understand that I don’t believe that the world owes me a living. But what this means is that, if I do not find a way to make up this shortfall this week, about seven Segundo interviews with some of today’s leading contemporary authors I had set up for the next three weeks will have to be canceled while I find immediate work elsewhere. (There are two interviews scheduled for this week and I plan to go ahead with these. And there are also some exciting interviews in the can that I hope to release once this financial setback has been resolved, including a provocative conversation with Steven Pinker and a two-part interview with Tom McCarthy.)

Now I don’t want to have to cancel these interviews. Trust me on this: these are all extremely interesting people. But if I cannot get $800 by the end of this week, I’m going to have to.

Here’s where you come in. As an experiment, I’m seeing if you — the readers and listeners who have been coming here — can help make up this $800 shortfall through donations. I’m not asking for a yearly salary like Jason Kottke once did and I certainly don’t want to make a regular habit of asking readers for donations. Nevertheless, in the grand scheme of things, collectively speaking, this is not a lot of dough.

I’ve produced 145 of these podcasts so far and made them available over the past two years for free. And I would like to continue devoting my time and energies doing this. As we all know, the number of outlets for in-depth literary interviews is shrinking. And I’ve been doing my best to fill in the gap with questions not usually asked of authors, careful reading of the books, and vigorous research.

If at some point, you’ve enjoyed any of the podcasts or any of the content here, please take some time to click on the Donation button below. If even sixteen of you contribute $50, then we’re back in business. Even if you can contribute $10, $5, beer money, it all helps. Let’s see if we can’t conquer this shortfall together. When I’ve raised around $800, I’ll remove this post and continue with business as usual.

And, as an added incentive, for those who contribute $10 or more, I’ll throw in a homemade chapbook containing an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Humanity Unlimited, an excerpt from my play, Wrestling an Alligator, a brief history of Bat Segundo’s sordid past, along with a few other items. The chapbook is only available through a donation.

Thanks very much for your time.

Correspondent: It seems very extraordinary that it was only three drafts to get this. I mean, because the prose itself, it has this really illusory speed to it, in the sense that one reads it, thinking, “Oh, well, this is a rather brisk read.” And then you introduce the detail, like the weird guy at the bar. Where did he come from? I don’t remember him being referenced earlier. And yet this often happens, in terms of [the protagonist’s[ perception. So in terms of playing with readers’ perceptions, was this very much in place early on?

McCarthy: It fell into place really early on. I mean, as soon as the guy’s voice came, and it came early, because he’s not an intellectual or an artist. He’s just a very average — he’s a Joe Schmoe. He’s some bloke. He doesn’t even have a name. He’s kind of an everyman. As soon as his voice was there, it just picked up its own rhythm and then the set of modulating repetitions and the phrases that come back, they just suggested themselves. It’s like pinball. Once you go into multiple mode, they kind of stay up there for a bit, you know what I mean? And it just seemed to happen with this book.

Correspondent: So the momentum in this book, in writing it, came from these repetitive phrases. These incantations?

McCarthy: Yeah, exactly, there’s a sort of incantatory logic to it. A neurotic repetitiveness. And once that gets going, it kind of auto-repeats. It goes into auto-pilot mode of self-repetition. Like the classical model of neurosis in Freud or whatever. You can see that playing out rhetorically in the writing, in the text of this book, I think.

Correspondent: I actually wanted to ask you about the time period in this book. You make a few clues that it might be the late ’90’s. You have the rising telecommunications stock.

McCarthy: Yeah.

Correspondent: You have the Propellerheads song from 1999 or somewhere along those lines. You have the airport security being particularly lax. And I’m wondering why the late ’90’s time frame seemed to be the best to set this particular narrative.

McCarthy: It’s pretty much when I wrote it. I wrote it from 2000 to 2001. In fact, I finished it just about a month before September the 11th. So it’s kind of ironic. This book has been interpreted as an allegory of September the 11th or reviewed as foreign policy. The hero starts out the victim or some sort of calamity and he ends up the perpetrator of other calamities, which is kind of what the U.S. has done.

Correspondent: Yeah.

McCarthy: But it’s entirely accidental. I mean, it was all written before that. But no, you’re right. It did come out of that. I imagine that it’s set sometime during 1999, 2000, as the stock market bubble was going up and then spectacularly bursting at the end of the book.

Correspondent: Well, you even have the notion of this company, which is Time Control UK. I wanted to ask you about this. I mean, did this come about from the notion of — all you had to do in that time period was essentially write out a five-page prospectus and anyone would give you money? Or were there actually specific companies that you based Time Control UK on?

McCarthy: Oh yeah! These concierge companies were just emerging in the UK, who would more or less do anything for you. They live your life vicariously, or they stretch your life for you. Which I just find kind of fascinating. I mean, it’s quite kind of metaphysical really, you know, you outsource your godliness. You outsource your autonomy, even though obviously you’re paying them. And the stock market, I just found it really fascinating. This bubble and these companies that were just making paper millionaires out of people that had virtually no premise. Like eSolutions. I mean, what on earth is that? I read this article about the South Sea bubble of the 17th century — or was it the 18th century? — where stocks were going so high that people would throw their money at anything and there was a company called A Very Good Idea Yet No One to Know What It Is.

Correspondent: (laughs)

McCarthy: And, of course, its shares sold out in a day. And, of course, it went bankrupt six months later. But in this book, the movements of capital are very much tied in with the movements of everything else. So this idea of speculation, which has an astronomical meaning as well. Contemplation of the heavens. And my hero spends a lot of time just looking at constellations of dust suspended in a stairwell. And they’re either going up or down. And the shares are doing the same thing.

(A two-part interview with Tom McCarthy, the author of Remainder, is coming soon to The Bat Segundo Show.)